


Long Enough

by Branch



Series: Canon Amelioration [2]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Canon - Anime, Canon Amelioration, Drama, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-11
Updated: 2010-01-11
Packaged: 2017-10-06 04:06:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/49503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Branch/pseuds/Branch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scar's experience at Lior, and after. Spoilers ep 42, first series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The world was red. Red with blood. Red with pain clawing through his body. Red with the light rising around him. He watched it brighten, growing as each breath slowed, until one last breath felt like it wasn’t air any more. The world was red, and he was red, light and hollow and and rising like the glow.

The light flickered. Faltered. He blinked and didn’t feel his eyes. Was it finished already? Shouldn’t it be longer, for all the soldiers to die, like he was dying? Like he was…

An image hit him like a hammer, of the circle over the city, completed by his body.

_His body._

The last length of the array wasn’t inscribed. It was only… filled. And now it was being emptied as the array consumed him along with everything else.

Now he struggled. Now he grasped after that last length of the pattern with hands that only existed any more in his mind. His will. He had to hang on. He had to stay, or the circle would fail. He had to stay just a little longer.

Revenge. Lives. Solid life, condensed into Stone. Into flesh. Into metal. His remaining flesh had to stay or it would all be for nothing. The lives that the army had eaten. The life that his brother had given him. The life and chance and curse he had passed on to Alphonse Elric.

He clutched at solidity, at presence, fighting against the rising current of red. He had to stay just a little longer. Just long enough. He had to hold on.

_Hold on._

He felt his fingers digging into the dirt and the light surged up. Red speared the sky. The world was red.

Black followed after it.


	2. Chapter 2

The cool hardness of shaded sand was under his head. Under his back. Under his hands. There was a reason this shouldn’t be so. His eyes drifted open as he tried to remember what it was. The black-haired woman who was not _her_ sat near with her back to a rock and her knees drawn up, watching him. She stirred as his eyes found her.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by now,” she said, clinically. “You’re the most willful human I’ve ever met. Though the Fullmetal boy could give you competition.” Her mouth twisted. “Perhaps we’ve been selecting the wrong workers all along.”

Fullmetal… Elric. The little brother. The city. He sat up abruptly, clutching at the sand under him as his head swam and the world swayed in a dizzy circle. Circle.

“Why am I still alive?” He frowned at her. “Did you…?”

She leaned her head back against the broken stone and laughed, sweet and cold. “We can’t do alchemy; only humans can. I couldn’t have interfered in a transmutation if I’d tried.” She left her head tilted back, staring up at the sky. “I just found you afterwards.”

He levered himself up to his knees to look around and stopped as he felt his hands, his arms under him. Shock froze his lungs. He lifted two hands up and watched them shake. “What?” He didn’t recognize his own voice.

She glanced back at him and her bare shoulders shifted with a short breath of amusement. “You were in the middle of the transmutation of the Philosopher’s Stone. What surprises you?” She stood and looked down at him. “Now it’s really goodbye.”

Later he would remember her fingers brushing through his hair as she walked out onto empty sand and away.

**End **


End file.
